Six months? Well, for Lakers star Kobe Bryant, it’s possible. Just not likely.

Bryant suffered a leg injury on Friday night that is almost certainly a torn Achilles' tendon—he was slated to have an MRI on Saturday, and if the tendon is torn he will quickly be shuttled into surgery. Bryant will, obviously miss the rest of the season, but there is at least a chance he will be ready to come back at some point in October, which would clear the way for him to be ready for the season’s start.

As Dr. Alan Beyer, medical director of Hoag Orthopedic Institute in Southern California, explained on Saturday morning: “It is a six-month injury at minimum before he can be back at any kind of level of performance anywhere close to where he was before. Kobe’s history has been that he has shrugged off injuries and got back a lot faster than the norm. I would venture a guess that, Kobe is an animal, he gets up at 3 in the morning when he has an injury like this one. I would guess that he would be on the short end of the recovery rather than the long end.”

Six months would be the best-case scenario for Bryant. More likely, he will be out for something in the range of 9-12 months, which means we probably won’t see Bryant until 2014.

“Some people can come back from an injury like that in six months but that’s the weekend-warrior type,” said Dr. Ken Huh, an orthopedic surgeon in Long Beach. “For someone playing at the level that Kobe plays at, you’d expect it to be nine months at minimum, and it could be as much as a year. It is not an injury you can hurry back from. His left leg is his jump leg, and that makes it even trickier—he needs explosiveness from the leg, and that is going to put a lot of pressure on it.”

The immediate concern for the Lakers is the effect that Bryant’s injury will have on the team’s tenuous playoff chances. The Lakers lead the Jazz for the final playoff spot in the West, but only by one game. Bryant has been outstanding, averaging 27.3 points on 46.3 percent shooting with 6.0 assists and 5.6 rebounds. He has only gotten better as the season has gone on—in six April games, Bryant averaged 30.5 points, 7.0 rebounds and 7.5 assists.

“You’re at a bigger risk for injury when you’re tired,” Huh said. “Especially if you are dealing with other injuries, and he has had ankle and knee issues. You win by putting your body in situations it shouldn’t be in. When you factor in his age, he would be a prime candidate for something like this.”

Bryant has been in the NBA for 17 seasons and played 1,239 regular-season games. He has also made seven trips to the NBA Finals, logging another 220 games in the playoffs. That adds up. “The problem with Kobe is not just age,” Beyer said. “For a 34-year-old, he has a lot of miles on his odometer. He has been doing this since he was 17 years old at a professional level. And I think it is just a function of the injury coming as a result of the miles he has on his odometer. That Achilles' has taken a lot more wear and tear than the average 34-year-old who started playing in the NBA when he was 21. That’s really the issue.”

There is the long-term issue too—suppose Bryant does buck the odds and returns for the start of the season, or close to it. Can he be his old self again? That’s probably too much to ask. His injury is reminiscent of the one suffered by another star guard in L.A., the Clippers’ Chauncey Billups, who tore his Achilles' last February at age 35. Billups returned 10 months later, but has struggled to stay healthy this year, playing only 20 games and just 19.1 minutes per game. He is currently out with a groin injury.

When an Achilles' tendon is repaired, it generally winds up shorter than before. Think of cutting a rope and tying it back together—it’s going to shorten by whatever amount of rope was used to tie the knot. That makes the tendon and the ankle stiffer, and cuts down the amount of explosion a player gets from that leg. Beyer said it is possible Bryant will lose an inch or two from his vertical leap. “The tendon will be reattached in a position that is slightly shorter than is anatomic, and that is going to hurt his propulsiveness a little bit,” Beyer said.

The injury takes on even more weight in the context of how the end of Bryant’s career will play out. He has long said that he planned to play next season and retire after that, but added a footnote this year—his contract is up after 2013-14, and if he were to change his mind about retirement, he promised to do so this summer. Then, he could sign an extension and not burden the team with his decision next year.

If Bryant concludes that he can’t return at the same level, he might be all the more convinced that retirement is the best option. And however quickly he returns, he won’t be the same.

“If you’re 21 and you tear an Achilles', you can come back and be 100 percent,” Huh said. “But when you’re 34, your body doesn’t really recover that way, and for him, with the injury coming to his jump leg, that same explosiveness he needs probably is not going to be there. You can’t really say what percentage he’ll come back at—80 is realistic, he could be 90 percent because of how hard he works. It won’t be 100 percent, though.”

We will see Kobe Bryant in a Lakers uniform again—with an extraordinary recovery, that could even happen in this calendar year. But we won’t see the guy who ranks third in the league in scoring or the guy who plays 38.6 minutes per game, second in the NBA. Kobe will be back, but with this injury, it will be difficult for him to ever really be Kobe again.